Eggies’ Trip
Mindmap
Character Design turn-around sheet (by Kechu)
Storyboard (by all group members)
Animatic （by Linhao）
Cake City Environment Design/Sketch (by Amber)
Cake City Environment (Maya by Amber and Yucheng)
Zoom out of the Background (V.1 by Amber)
Zoom out of the Background (V.2 by Amber)
Zoom out of background (final)
I drew many background for this zoom out and finally chose the ones that can show a big zoom-out of a city. The important point I realised when drawing and editing is that showing more areas of the island and the road are more important than showing the sky around the island. Showing gradually zoomed out island will bring a more exaggerated jump from the ground to the sky.
Reflection
For teamwork, I think our group members collaborated efficiently. Time management is one of the most important parts of teamwork, so we gave each work part a deadline to guarantee we would have enough time for working. We also had a clear division of roles, so we took responsibility for our own parts and usually showed each other progress when we met at school. During Christmas, because of the work division, we could still work on our parts efficiently. After Christmas, we almost finished the animation and had plenty of time to edit and improve. The method we can apply the next time is to set up an online drive for showing progress without delay. By doing so, we can communicate more and better collaborate during weekends and vacations.
I mainly took responsibility for 3D background design and modeling, 2D background drawing, editing, sound effects making, and some parts of character animation. When doing the 3D model of the cake city on Maya, the most difficult part is to model the cake houses to approach the materials and softness of real cakes. To solve this problem, we found online teaching videos for modeling cake, such as how to model soft creams on doughnuts. Also, we adjusted the metalness and roughness of different materials according to their features and physical properties. For example, creams often reflect less light than chocolates, so we needed to tell the difference of materials in our model. Although there were many difficulties along the way, Rain and I collaborated well on the 3D background. However, there are still things we can improve. For example, elements that overlap each other penetrate and overlay in a wrong way, which will bring flaws to the background. For example, we failed to make the bottoms of the houses totally covered by undulating snow on the ground. All the detailed problems should be checked for times each time we are working on a project.
As we animated the characters’ movements in 2D with 3D background, we met many problems when integrating them together harmoniously. After each time of talking with tutors, we would make some improvements such as adding shadows to the 2D layers, making them fit better into a 3D background. The zoom-out part when the characters are flying to the sky was the most struggling part for me. I did many different versions of drawings to find the most suitable ones for this huge zoom-out. At first, the zoom-out animation was unsmooth and integrated at a wrong pace. I tried many times of editing and finally learned how to use Ae to do the eased zoom-out and cut with Jess, which is somehow difficult for me as I spent a lot of time adjusting the graph of ease. But the zoom-out animation finally turns out well and follows the right pace, creating a fancy effect of an exaggerated jump from the land to the sky.
Our theme for this animation is light pollution. We came up with this topic when we were brainstorming from our word cloud. We linked lights and stars together to express our concept, transforming the lights into the stars in the sky as an unexpected ending. As light pollution is caused by strong exposure of lights in the city and leads to the loss of stars in the night sky, this transformation between lights and stars is the most important plot in our story. To tell the story in a direct but more interesting way, we designed a cake city and our egg characters to showcase the concept of light pollution.
From my overall experience, one of the things that benefit our project most is we discussed with tutors a lot and refined our animation again and again as we finished the first version of the animation early. Each time we showed tutors our animation, they would suggest new things we can improve, such as adding shadows to 2D layers, adding a blur fading between two scenes, using Ae to speed up and ease the zoom out of the environment, and so on. However, the eggs suddenly turn into shining stars confused some audiences when we showed our classmates after finishing the whole project. They thought we should design better bonds between the eggs and stars. Therefore, always keep talking and asking for ideas from others as they may bring some new perspectives for improvements. This project taught me a lot not only about the personal improvement of animation skills but also about how to collaborate with team members in a long-run project and always reflect on ourselves with others’ suggestions.